Masters of Illusions

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  “Then, about a year later, she called me. Rhoda Banks told me her brother-in-law reached her and that he told her the surviving son eventually died of complications from his injuries.”

  “What?” Margie couldn’t help herself.

  “Let him finish, honey.”

  “But why would he say such a thing?”

  Chick said, “Yeah. Why? It never crossed my mind that it was a lie. Who would have thought to question that Corcoran guy—we only worked with the squeaky wheels. Hundred and fifty dead kids needing to be sorted out. Why should we question him? His story was simple.”

  Chick, Margie knew, was really asking himself how he had messed up. But what was he supposed to do? Keep going back to people and asking if they’d counted correctly? Are you sure you lost two kids? Maybe you lost three. Are you sure this little girl isn’t your little girl? And then the Corcorans were just an aunt and an uncle, not parents. Margie saw that Chick, everybody actually, would rather have kept the Little Miss a mystery rather than have another heartbroken family; there had been so many.

  Chick got up and stood still for just a few seconds, and then he got on the phone for half an hour. Margie and Charlie listened as he put the wheels into motion. His network of friends and comrades tracked down Rhoda Banks. She was at St. Theresa’s Nursing Home in West Hartford. She was indigent. Chick went off to Bob Corcoran’s hotel to tell him that his mother was not dead, to apologize, and then to bring him to see his mother. Charlie and Margie met them at the nursing home. Margie refused to let Charlie bring the tape recorder. “Not now, Charlie. If anybody says something worth remembering, you’ll remember it.” He wanted to protest, but it was Margie who was asking for something so he didn’t.

  Mrs. Banks screamed when Bob came into the room, even though she knew he was coming—the nuns had prepared her. But in that first instant, she thought Bob was her husband. It took a while to calm her. Then she was so overwhelmed with guilt for not knowing Bob was alive, and Bob was so enraged at his aunt and uncle’s deception, that Mrs. Banks started weeping terribly and Bob began punching one hand into the other as if he were a robot with his dial set to that one action. The nuns kept trying to soothe Mrs. Banks but no one had the courage to reach out to her son. And then Chick, though he tried, could not contain himself. Amidst the wailing his voice boomed the way it had in the war room, his question a clap of thunder, and they were all struck by it. “Why didn’t you identify your daughter, Mrs. Banks?”

  It took a while to set in. At some point, after she could speak, obviously Rhoda Banks must have been shown the picture. She must have seen it in the papers. It was there every year, year after year, in the Hartford Courant and a thousand other papers across the country.

  The nuns gaped at Chick. Bob stopped pounding at himself, and Mrs. Banks turned to stone. She made a little noise and they all looked at her. Margie knew about scars. The ones on Mrs. Banks’s face were terrible. And she looked like such an old, old woman, though she was several years younger than Chick. Chick said in his normal voice, “Please, Mrs. Banks.”

  Rhoda Banks said, “My sister wanted to believe her alive. Well, so did I. And my brother-in-law… maybe…” she stopped, took a breath, and now her voice came out angry. “… he must have figured… he knew that maybe… if his wife at least had Bobby…”

  Then she covered her ravaged face with her hands. Bob Corcoran said, “He figured if she had me, she would forget about Louise. Well, she didn’t.”

  He went over to his mother, and took her hands down, and held them tight. His mother looked into his eyes. And then Mrs. Banks said to him, mother to son, “What did Louise call your Aunt Elizabeth?”

  Bob pressed his lips together, but he got the word out: “Mama.”

  Mrs. Banks said to Chick, “Louise called my sister Mama. After living with my sister, she called her Mama and she didn’t call me anything. She was my sister’s daughter. My sister took her from me.” Her eyes went back to Bob “But why did she have to take you, too? My big boy?” And she pulled Bob’s hands back to her cheeks. Her voice came through the fingers of Bob’s hands, and everyone listened, paralyzed. “I wanted to be dead. Sometimes I just thought—even years after the fire—well, we’re all dead. Then I’d remember. I wasn’t. Later… in the papers… I saw the picture. But Louise had straight hair, not curly hair. When I saw the picture… after all that time… the pretty curls… I couldn’t be sure, could I? My sister… my sister had Louise’s hair styled and permed. And I… I had to cut my own hair with my sewing scissors.” She was drifting, but she came right back. “It was the curls. My daughter had straight hair, not curls. That’s what I kept thinking about. And… and maybe Louise was alive, after all. Maybe two little girls got mixed up.… Maybe one of my children had lived.…” She drifted.

  Then Bob said, “Mama. One of them did.”

  The old woman’s head turned back to her son. And then she became overwhelmed and began weeping. Weeping and weeping. Bob held her in his arms, kept saying he was going to bring her home with him and take care of her. Margie broke down. Charlie put his arm around her. Chick had his head in his hands. The nuns didn’t cry; instead they prayed furiously, their lips moving a mile a minute. Their prayers worked. It took a while, but a wave of calm spread across the room. The crying became sniffling and the nuns passed around a box of Kleenex. And finally, someone spoke again. Rhoda Banks. She said to Bob, “You’re a fine man. You’re a handsome man, like your Pop.” And that got him going again. He couldn’t control his tears, but they weren’t tears of despair, or rage either, like at first. They were tears of relief. Tears of peace.

  “It was the Depression, Bobby. He had to go find work. But I guess he couldn’t. He knew your aunt would take care of us. Her husband had money. That’s why he didn’t come back. For our own good.”

  Margie could hear her heart beating. She was no longer feeling pity for Bob Corcoran, but envy. He had found his mother.

  Bob Corcoran’s whole body was shaking, and Rhoda Banks did her best to hold him and pat him. But still it wasn’t over. Chick cleared his throat, Margie guessed to keep himself from bellowing again. He asked, “Mrs. Banks, could you positively identify the photograph of Little Miss 1565 as your daughter, Louise Corcoran, today?”

  Bob said, “Banks. Louise Banks. My uncle changed my name… after.”

  Chick said, “Louise Banks.”

  Rhoda Banks said, “No, I couldn’t.”

  But Charlie, who loved his own little baby girl so and whose mind worked in different ways from the rest, said, “Do you have a picture of Louise, Mrs. Banks?”

  She looked at the nuns and smiled. They looked at each other and then smiled back at her. One of them went over to Rhoda Banks’s bureau, opened a drawer, and took out a picture album. Rhoda Banks said to Chick, “My husband had a Brownie box camera. He knew how to develop film, too. He taught me.”

  And there, first with one brother and then with two, were pages and pages of the pretty little blond girl so many people held in their hearts, except that her hair was fine and straight. The last picture in the album was of Louise, her bright hair fit with a big bow, pulling her little brother in the new red Radio Flyer wagon he’d gotten for his birthday. Timmy had on a party hat. Bob stood off, the big brother, arms folded across his chest, surveying the scene. There was no question that Louise Banks was Little Miss 1565.

  Bob said, “I want her to be with Timmy.”

  Chick said, “I’ll start on that right now,” and his voice was quaking so hard that Charlie went with him down the corridor to the phone. Margie was near the doorway so she heard Charlie say, “I’m gonna get the son of a bitch, Chick. I’m gonna get him.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Margie had never been worried about Charlie before. Oh, she worried about him all the time because he was a fireman—he’d been burned several times. And he had a bad cough. Some fires he put out released blankets of asbestos dust onto him. But she’d never worried about his hobby. His
hobby was not dangerous, his work was. The hobby was a game. Like Clue, Martha’s favorite. But it should have ended. Life was divided into segments, after all. When you have a child, you see the segments clearly. Children finish with one and move into the next. Adults do the same thing. But Charlie’s life was just one big section that didn’t seem to have a finish. In fact, if anything, it had become more intense; Charlie himself had become more intense because of the Little Miss, who now had a name, and because of the arsonist, who now had a name as well—Louise’s murderer. Charlie was more bent than ever on finding his firebug, whom he no longer called the Arsonist. Now it was Louise’s Killer.

  Margie decided to have a visit with her mother-in-law, Palma. Palma had lived alone since her husband died, the year Martha was born. But she didn’t live alone the way Margie’s father lived alone. She loved visitors; whoever came was welcome. That’s because Denny O’Neill, when he was alive, had never let her have any friends. Not even visitors, except for her children when they’d grown up and no longer lived at home. He wasn’t just an alcoholic, he was scum.

  Margie asked Palma the kinds of things she’d asked her Aunt Jane about herself, only about Charlie. She asked, “Was Charlie always such a serious person?”

  Palma said, “No.”

  Margie waited for more, but Palma had become busy breaking out the cannoli and getting the espresso machine cooking. When she’d put all the goodies in front of her daughter-in-law, she sat down across the table, and Margie asked, “When did he change?”

  Palma cradled her cup in both hands as if she’d just come in from the cold. She said, “Margie, this new generation—Martha’s and my other grandchildren’s—they believe it is important to speak of any such thing that is troubling them. To talk those things out. My generation was taught that to let people see inside you was a sign of weakness.”

  Margie said, “And mine was in the middle. We never knew what to do so we just said anything or did anything without really thinking about it. The impulse generation.”

  “Yes. And now you’ve decided that Martha’s has the right idea.”

  “I think so.”

  “You were always one to ask questions, though.”

  “I know. But that was just to hear myself think. I don’t think I got good answers.” And Margie thought of Baby Pete, and the sperm, and the one-word answer that was all he needed.

  Palma talked to Margie because she knew how much her daughter-in-law loved her son. When other people visited her, she’d flit around doing all sorts of things at once, but now she sat down and drank her coffee. She would talk to Margie.

  “I don’t like what’s happening,” Margie said.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I’m beginning to look at Charlie in a new light.”

  Palma tossed a little grappa in their coffee, which was what her father used to do when he talked with his Abruzzi cronies. Before her husband died, when she’d make time for Margie, her eyes would keep shifting back and forth to be sure her husband wasn’t hovering somewhere. When her little antennae told her he wanted something, she’d excuse herself and go to the bedroom or den and say, “Did you want something, Denny?” He always did. And when he didn’t, he’d make up something. If she didn’t stay a step ahead of him, he’d get especially ugly. He expected her to know what he wanted and when he wanted it, and she was able to do it, her intuition based on his location in the house, the tone of the grunts he emitted, and her cultural traditions.

  Her eyes still shifted back and forth now and again—the habit so ingrained—but then she’d relax. She was no longer on call twenty-four hours a day. Also, now that the grappa was on a shelf next to the Crisco instead of hidden under the sink behind the hundred of bottles of cleaning fluids and powders, she’d take a hit quite often, not just with coffee. It loosened her up.

  Margie said, “Palma, I didn’t think an answer to my questions would mean that you’d have to expose something you don’t want to expose.”

  Palma sighed. She ate another cannoli. She was so fat. She sighed again. She said, “Charlie was a happy baby. All my children were happy so long as they were small enough to fit into my arms. Then, after that, I couldn’t protect them from their father. I thank God for my brothers who did.” She made the sign of the cross over the expanse of her upper body.

  Her brothers. Charlie and his own brothers adored them all, these Italian uncles who were all over six feet tall and who took after their mother from the Piedmont, strapping mountain climbers. One or another of them had been always at the ready, protecting their round little sister from the wrath of her husband. Charlie couldn’t help but adore them, considering that his father was such a mean bastard. And then he came to truly love them because he realized that they’d have killed his father if the man laid a finger on their sister, saving Charlie and his brothers the trauma of having to do it themselves. The uncles respected their sister’s marriage and never said a disapproving word to her, but they’d have thrown their brother-in-law in the Hog River if he’d touched her.

  “Because of my brothers, Denny never hit the kids, but he was very cruel to them.” Then she played with her fork, which was still clean. She’d shoveled the cannoli down her throat with her fingers. Her eyes were wet, though Palma, like Margie, wasn’t a weeper.

  Margie never wanted to hear about cruelty, but now she had no choice. Not if she really loved Charlie. She said, “What is it, Palma?”

  Palma said, “People used to say he was mean because he was a drunk, but that wasn’t so. His drinking gave him the excuse he needed to be mean. A built-in excuse: I had too much to drink so I can’t help it if I’m mean. But, Margie, he liked being mean. The meaner he was, the more he enjoyed himself.”

  Margie could only think to say, “I’m so sorry, Palma.”

  Margie had once asked her, a long time ago, how she could have stayed married to such a horrible man. That was before she found out about the tyranny of domestic economics from Martha. Palma had said that she stayed because the priests told women that men became mean when their wives riled them. How could you leave a man for being angry with you when you were the one who had brought on the anger? Treat your husband with kindness, they’d said, and he will, in turn, love and protect you. So she had maintained such a preposterous bargain only to realize that kindness is seen as stupidity by mean people and makes them even meaner.

  The priests didn’t know that when you’re kind to a bully, the bully figures you’re weak and worthless. That was because priests entered seminaries when they were fourteen years old. Once Margie said to Charlie that she hoped someday an archaeologist would find another 2,000-year-old scroll that said that Joseph beat the shit out of Mary when she told him she was pregnant. You want to get your boyfriend angry, tell him you’re knocked up and that he’s not the father. And at the time, Charlie got this look of wonder on his face, a look that didn’t reflect Margie’s, for a change. He said, “You know, it’s true. People make believe you’ve gotten them angry so that they can get angry at you.” Margie didn’t know what he was talking about. She told Martha what he’d said. They had discussed the possible meanings. Then Martha had said, “Daddy really would like to open his mind. He would. But he can’t because his disk space is full. Full of that circus shit. He’s obviously capable of thinking provocatively. Something has actually managed to sneak into his brain that didn’t have anything to do with that damn fire.” But Margie could see that it would be hard for anything else to enter his mind, seeing as how he was married to a woman whose back was covered with the damn fire’s scars. She didn’t know about disk space.

  The other reason Palma stayed with her husband was to avoid dishonor, the Italian code word.

  “Margie?”

  “Yes, Palma?”

  “You’ve got that look.”

  “I know.”

  Palma meant that Margie looked bitter. No one else noticed, just Palma. Maybe Martha, too. Palma’s generation got so much practice in reading
other people’s minds. The Palma generation figured that you were lazy and indifferent if you didn’t make the time and effort to figure out what was bothering someone else. And then when you figured it out, you didn’t bring up the topic; you just offered the person a cannoli.

  Palma said to Margie, “All my children had to learn to tiptoe around their father. That will make a child serious.”

  “Palma, why did you marry your husband?”

  Palma looked down into her cup. “Because he had a trade. He was a painter. He got steady work.”

  “But…”

  “It was the Depression, Margie.” Now she looked back up. “Have you come to tell me you’re divorcing Charlie?”

  “Palma!” Margie couldn’t believe she’d said that. “Of course not. Charlie and I love each other.”

  “Then what is wrong, Margie?”

  Margie started to say nothing, but that wouldn’t have been fair. Palma had answered her; she should answer Palma. Margie refused to make Palma try to read her mind. Palma was a tired woman. She deserved peace. Margie said, “To tell the truth, Palma, I am really beginning to get damn sick and tired of this circus shit.” Next, Margie was about to ask Palma her advice, but Palma suddenly reached across the table and gripped Margie’s wrist. She said, “Get him to stop.”

  Get him to stop. To stop? Finding the pyromaniac was what Charlie was. Get him to stop, was sort of like, “Get him to shed his skin.” Get the Statue of Liberty to put down the torch and give her arm a rest. And what about this divorce business? Had Palma read that from her vantage point across the table? Did Margie not know what was in her own mind? She was exasperated. So she called Martha at school. Charlie and Margie and their families referred to Yale as “school” so that they’d stop being awestruck. Martha was the one who had made the suggestion when she got tired of everyone being tongue-tied whenever they tried to get out the word Yale.